Between-seasons competitive balance in European football: review of existing and development of specially designed indices

Abstract

Competitive balance is a key issue for any professional sport league substantiated by its effect on demand for league games or other associated products. This work focuses on the measurement of between-seasons competitive balance, the longest time-wise dimension, which captures the relative quality of teams across seasons. The review of the existing indices examines their applicability in the context of European football. Given that domestic championships are multi-prized tournaments, as opposed to the more common North American unitary structure with a single prize, a set of specially designed indices that capture the complex structure of European football are introduced. An empirical investigation, using data from the English Premier League, further elucidates the main features of all appropriate indices by exploring their value and trend. It may be inferred that between-seasons competitive balance in England worsens through seasons mainly due to the very low ranking mobility of the top teams through seasons."The nature of the industry (of baseball) is such that competitors must be of approximate equal size if any are to be successful" (Rottenberg 1956).

League Ranking Mobility Affects Attendance: Evidence From European Soccer Leagues

“…The other, dynamic approach focuses on the team-specific variation of performance between seasons of the league, over time. It is also referred to as betweenseasons CB in other papers (Manasis & Ntzoufras, 2014). The variance of winning percentages was first decomposed to a static (cumulative variance) and a dynamic (time variance) component in the studies of Eckard (1998) and Eckard (2001).…”

“…For the analyses in this study, the Index of Dynamics (DN) is preferred over the other indicators, as it is easier to modify and interpret. According to Manasis and Ntzoufras (2014), DN and the correlation coefficients are very highly correlated, so they should not lead to very different conclusions. DN is calculated as follows:…”

“…The paper provides new empirical support for the long-term UOH in European soccer, by finding a significant positive effect of league ranking mobility on stadium attendance. It is done by adopting different measures of ranking mobility based on the studies of Haan et al (2007) and Manasis and Ntzoufras (2014), calculating them for multiple seasons of 19 European domestic soccer leagues, then testing their effect on average stadium attendance in an econometric model. This paper contributes to the literature by being the first study that tests the long-term UOH on a large set of domestic leagues for a long period of time.…”

A metric to measure dynamic competitive balance with respect to prize concentration

“…Tracking the turnover for n > 1 is important, for instance, in European domestic soccer leagues as the first positions grant teams qualification for pan-European tournaments such as the Champions League -i.e. qualification is a sort of a prize per se (Manasis & Ntzoufras, 2014).…”

Measuring Economic Inequality and Risk: A Unifying Approach Based on Personal Gambles, Societal Preferences and References

“…Furthermore, the Gini index is known to be a transformation of the area under the ROC curve, which has been widely used for assessing performance of classification rules and facilitated prudent decision making in a variety of areas (e.g., Krzanowski & Hand, 2009), including market segmentation (e.g., Benton & Hand, 2002). Business analysts and managers, including those of sports teams, have used the Gini index to gain useful information about the market and consumer behaviour (e.g., Fort & Quirk, 1995;Manasis et al, 2013;Manasis & Ntzoufras, 2014). Denneberg (1990) advocated the use of the Gini mean difference and the Gini index as safety loadings for insurance premiums.…”